“He is a nice boy in some ways,” Mrs. Lindley Grant had said on the occasion of the warning; “but, like all drinking men, he is a broken reed, eccentric and irresponsible.  No daughter of mine could marry him.  I’d rather bury her.  And if you want facts Lindley will give them to you.”

So the girl had sent back her ring and a cold little letter, and Billy Grant had got roaring full at a club that night and presented the ring to a cabman—­all of which is exceedingly sordid, but rather human after all.

The Nurse, having had no sleep for forty-eight hours, slept for quite thirty minutes.  She wakened at the end of that time and started up with a horrible fear that the thing she was waiting for had come.  But Billy Grant was still alive, sleeping naturally, and the thermometer, having been in place forty minutes, registered a hundred and three.

At eight o’clock the interne, hurrying over in fresh ducks, with a laudable desire to make the rounds before the Staff began to drop in, found Billy Grant very still and with his eyes closed, and the Nurse standing beside the bed, pale and tremulous.

“Why didn’t you let me know?” he demanded, aggrieved.  “I ought to have been called.  I told you——­”

“He isn’t dead,” said the Nurse breathlessly.  “He—­I think he is better.”

Whereon she stumbled out of the room into her own little room across the hall, locking the door behind her, and leaving the interne to hunt the symptom record for himself—­a thing not to be lightly overlooked; though of course internes are not the Staff.

The interne looked over the record and whistled.

“Wouldn’t that paralyse you!” he said under his breath. “’Pulse very weak.’  ‘Pulse almost obliterated.’  ‘Very talkative.’  ’Breathing hard at four A.M.  Cannot swallow.’  And then:  ’Sleeping calmly from five o’clock.’  ‘Pulse stronger.’  Temperature one hundred and three.’  By gad, that last prescription of mine was a hit!”

So now began a curious drama of convalescence in the little isolation pavilion across the courtyard.  Not for a minute did the two people most concerned forget their strange relationship; not for worlds would either have allowed the other to know that he or she remembered.  Now and then the Nurse caught Billy Grant’s eyes fixed on her as she moved about the room, with a curious wistful expression in them.  And sometimes, waking from a doze, he would find her in her chair by the window, with her book dropped into her lap and a frightened look in her eyes, staring at him.

He gained strength rapidly and the day came when, with the orderly’s assistance, he was lifted to a chair.  There was one brief moment in which he stood tottering on his feet.  In that instant he had realised what a little thing she was, after all, and what a cruel advantage he had used for his own purpose.

When he was settled in the chair and the orderly had gone she brought an extra pillow to put behind him, and he dared the first personality of their new relationship.